The title that demotes you

Posted on: 18 July 2026

Anyone signing off as CEO of a company he wholly owns is announcing, without realising it, that he can be sacked. Chief Executive Officer means precisely that: an officer to whom executive power has been delegated by a body that conferred it and that can take it back whenever it chooses, for cause or for a simple change of direction. The title does not describe ownership, it describes an appointment, and it is a position of service, however elevated, whose structural characteristic is not command but revocability.

The interesting part is that in Britain nobody notices, because here the fraud is impossible in the way it is possible elsewhere. Directors' duties are personal and codified in the Companies Act 2006, every appointment sits on a public register, and a board of some description always exists even when it consists of one person filing his own accounts at a kitchen table in Croydon. The word that carries the weight here is the plain one. Director is not a courtesy, it is an office with liabilities attached, and Companies House will confirm in thirty seconds who holds it, since when, and alongside whom. The vocabulary is already precise. What has been imported on top of it is not.

So the British version of the problem is not that the title lies about the structure. It is that it lies about the register, which is the one document in the whole arrangement that anybody can read for free. A man describing himself as Chief Executive Officer on LinkedIn while appearing at Companies House as the sole director of a company with issued share capital of one pound has not invented a governance structure, he has simply added a layer that the public record contradicts. In Italy, where I spend most of my year, the equivalent claim at least buries the truth: the law there offers a specific office, the amministratore unico, sole director and usually sole shareholder, whose whole point is that no collegiate body exists and the statute has actively excluded one. Adopting the American title in that setting substitutes for a structure that was deliberately left out. Here it merely decorates a structure that is on file, and the file is open.

Which makes the British case, in some ways, more instructive, because the incentive to inflate survives even where inflation is cheaply checkable. That tells you the audience for the title is not the person who checks.

The paradox worth sitting with is that the discarded word is the stronger one. A sole director who owns his own shares holds a species of power that no chief executive of a real company has ever held: he was appointed by nobody, answers to nobody, and cannot be replaced by a vote that does not exist. He concentrates in one person the ownership and the management, which is to say the two things that the entire architecture of the modern company spent three centuries prising apart, and he has done it lawfully, deliberately, with a form filed and a fee paid. It is the freest position in company law and it gets abandoned because it sounds like a man with a van. Whoever trades it for CEO has swapped a real power for a label that, read properly, diminishes it.

There is a reason underneath the aesthetic one and I suspect it is the reason that keeps the whole thing standing. Saying sole director forces you to say the true thing: there is nobody above me and nobody behind me, if this works it is mine and if it collapses that is mine too, with no intermediary and no committee to absorb the blame. It is a declaration of solitude rather than of strength. Saying CEO lets you summon, in the reader's head, an apparatus that is not there: a board that convenes, shareholders who deliberate, a process that selected the right person for the role. The imported word does the work of implying that somebody chose you.

Anthropology has a name for the mechanism and it is the cargo cult of the Melanesian islands after the Pacific war, where runways were cleared from earth and control towers built from bamboo in the belief that the aircraft, recognising the shape, would land. That was not stupidity, it was a wrong inference about cause and effect. The observed correlation was between the strip and the descent of goods, and what went unobserved was the entire logistics chain that produced them. The C-suite title on a company of four people has the same logical structure: copy the name of the organ and hope the organ appears. A CFO with no finance function to guard, a CTO in a firm where the technical person is one and is also the person who bought the domain, a CEO with no board that appointed him. The form is exact, the content absent.

I have watched this pattern run through every technological transition I have worked in, with different furniture each time. In the late nineties, as the internet arrived in the creative industries, agencies filled with New Media Managers and Digital Strategists in outfits where the digital work was materially done by one person, usually at night, often without a contract. The title was not describing a function, it was anticipating one, and anticipating it in the hope that declaring it might bring it into being. Occasionally that worked, because the declaration created an obligation somebody then honoured. More often it produced a more expensive business card.

The underlying mechanism is signalling in a market where the signal costs nothing. A title anyone can award himself carries no information, which is to say it fails to separate those who have earned it from those who have merely typed it, and it therefore devalues in exactly the manner of a currency printed without limit. The word director has a price, because it comes with personal liability before the law and an entry in a register that any counterparty, journalist or disgruntled supplier can consult. The word CEO on a profile page has no price at all, and this is why it is everywhere. The consequence is not that real chief executives now look fraudulent. It is that no title says anything, and whoever needs to communicate something true about themselves must do it by other means, because the channel is saturated with noise.

The reader who matters knows all this already. The person running a business with a turnover of twenty million, reading the profile of somebody turning over half a million with CEO at the top, does not think here is a peer. He thinks something simpler and considerably less generous: this man wants to appear to be something, and since he wants to appear, we shall negotiate accordingly. The inflated title fails to produce the effect for which it was chosen and produces the opposite one, and it produces it precisely among the audience it was meant to impress. Those who are impressed decide nothing. Those who decide are not impressed.

The larger cost is not reputational though. It is that the false title anaesthetises the real question. Calling yourself chief executive allows the indefinite postponement of the thing that structure will eventually have to face, which is who decides when I do not decide, who contradicts me when I am wrong, and who signs when I am in hospital. The sole director who calls himself a sole director at least has the problem in front of him in a clean form, knows he is a single point of failure, and can choose what to do about it. Whoever has already awarded himself the title of the collegiate body has solved the problem symbolically, and symbolic solutions have the property of removing the urgency without removing the risk. On the day a board is actually needed, it does not get assembled in three weeks.

What remains is a question of words used properly. Founder and sole director is an exact description. It states the ownership, it states the power, it states the solitude, it promises no organs that do not exist and it asks the reader to pretend nothing. It has the further advantage of being unfalsifiable in the good sense, because it is already filed and anyone may check it. CEO of a company in which you are the only shareholder is, quite literally, a declaration of having been hired by yourself.

Those who genuinely have a board are rarely in any hurry to mention it.